Building polarization through political discourse. Analysis of the use of peripheral cues in the rhetoric of Mexican President López Obrador

Abstract

Since his arrival to the presidency of Mexico in 2018, López Obrador has established a communication strategy focused on his daily press conferences, called mañaneras, through which he tries to establish the informative agenda of the country. It is common for the president to use a discursive rhetoric tending to polarization, for which he makes use of cues or labels that offer a context to understand the issues on which he is pronounced. The paper seeks to analyze the use of labels or cues by the president in his discourse, for which a quantitative content analysis was carried out on a sample of his interventions (N = 867) during a year in the mañaneras. The findings made it possible to detect two discursive schemes from the convergence of different cues: one that tends to present an Us visualized in a new government scheme, linked to positive aspects such as engagement or the fight against corruption, compared to an Others that presents the previous government, linked to negative aspects such as corruption.